“The next morning, as soon as daylight, we were all out. Sweeney’s first pan weighed five dollars. Hughes and Cover went up the gulch. Fairweather, Rogers, Sweeney and I went down. We staked two claims apiece, two hundred feet to the man, all connecting. We took fifty feet adjoining the claims on each side of the creek.
“We obtained about $180 that day altogether. We were tired and hungry and all out of provisions. As we panned the last gold we saw five antelope on the hill. Bill said to me: ‘Old man, if you ever looked straight for your supper, look straight now.’
“He went around one way and I went up the hill the other side, and each of us secured an antelope. We had neither coffee nor bread. Our supper consisted of antelope straight and visions of gold. We spent the next morning measuring the ground and staking it off. I wrote out the notices. The first I wrote was for Barney Hughes.
“‘What shall we call the gulch?’ I asked. ‘You name it,’ he said. So I called it Alder Gulch on account of the heavy clump of alders along the banks of the creek.”
Mr. Edgar was born in Dumfries, Scotland. He came to the United States when eighteen years of age. In 1850 he was in the Michigan lumber region; in 1857 he lived at Fergus Falls; in 1858 he was at Fort Geary, in the British possessions; in the fall of 1862 he was mining in Bannock and the following spring joined the party that discovered Alder gulch. Mr. Edgar is now past seventy-four years of age, and lives with his wife in a cozy mountain home near Plains, in Missoula county, in this state.
Robert Vaughn.
Sept. 25, 1899.